November 13, 2016

I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks, with a break this last Tuesday and Wednesday to witness and then mourn the death of American Democracy (I’m only slightly exaggerating) I’ve been obsessing the new iPhone 7. I don’t need it. I have an iPhone 6S Plus. It’s fast, it’s not broken, and does all the things I need it to do. But I have a sickness. Every year I say i’m going to skip this generation, but every year I end up buying the latest iPhone.

My wife (I love that woman) will humor me as I spend money on a device that she very well knows i don’t need. And this year, I was ready to pre-order the new shiny Jet Black hotness. When it came time to do the deed, I hesitated. Maybe this year I could wait and just get the phone next year. After all, rumors were that next years iPhone would completely blow my mind as it was the 10th anniversary. No, I decided I need this phone too.

My first iPhone was the iPhone 3G, then I bought the 3GS. But I had held out until 3 months before the iPhone 4 was released to make that purchased, so I had to skip the iPhone 4, and I regretted it the entire next year. The next year I bought the iPhone 4S, and have kept on the upgrade train every year since. So this phone would be another link in my long chain of annual upgrades.

But those few seconds of uncertainty cost me. After selecting the iPhone I wanted and going for the check out, I realized that the ship times for the Jet Black model had slipped from September 16th to shipping within 4-6 weeks. It’s ok, I thought, I’ll pre-order and just get it when I get it, besides, Apple is known for under-promising and over-delivering when it comes to these ship times.

Then, when I went to go put in the order, AT&T’s servers were having issues with the load. I couldn’t authenticate to be able to order my phone. And within the time that it took Apple to figure out that the servers weren’t going to respond and let me know that my spot in line had been saved, the ship times had slipped to 6-8 weeks. That’s absurd, I thought, I wouldn’t get that until the beginning of November! I’ll just go to the Apple Store in a week or two and pick one up from them.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, Here we are, Mid-November, and I am still without an iPhone. As it turns out, if there aren’t enough supplies of the Jet Black 7 Plus iPhone to fill orders before November, that also means there aren’t enough supplies to stock at the Apple Store.

The Crazy thing is that I’m still not 100% sold on getting the phone. I want one something fierce, don’t get me wrong, but every once in a while, I’ll make peace with the idea that I’ll just have to hold out until next year. Then two days later, I’ll be checking stock at the 10 closest Apple Stores around me to see if any of them has the phone I want.

I still don’t know if I’m going to get the iPhone 7. As of right now, there isn’t any stock at my local Apple Store anyway. But if I don’t get one by the end of the year, I’m pretty sure my wife is going to just make me wait anyway.